At No.3, I have decided to count the excellent Creativity Online in the chart. Formerly known as Ad Critic, this site is a lot more than an ad blog - it has a wealth of opinion, analysis and interviews. But since the line between a website and a blog continues to blur, and their content is updated daily, I'm including it.

The Australian ad site Campaign Brief makes its debut at No.19. If you have an interest in the land Down Under, or just like sparky ad blogs, I recommend it.

Only Dead Fish (Swim With The Water) is a highly insightful UK advertising/marketing/social media blog written by Neil Perkin of IPC Media, now in the chart at No.24. Neil's traffic has doubled in the last 12 months. Go visit and you will see why.

Finally, my friend Faris, who has previously featured in the UK Top 10 but is now based in New York (as McCann Erickson's 'Digital Ninja'), has busted into the world chart at No.24. His blog Talent Imitates, Genius Steals will make you just a little bit smarter every time you read it. Plus it's amusing.

For those new to this quarterly-published chart, I might just re-cap that it’s drawn from the rankings of web metrics company Alexa, who measure visits by users who have the Alexa toolbar installed. Since that means mostly bloggers and techies, the chart is somewhat biased towards blogs which are popular with other bloggers, or tech-heads.

Some people say the chart is extremely boring, others say it helps them discover new things. I just like doing charts. I also like maps, and statistics. So sue me.

An ↑ means a blog's traffic has gone up by 15% or more in the last quarter, and a ↓ means it's gone down 15%.

UK means UK-based. Ad blog means ad blogs not marketing or PR blogs. I would love to be able to include Dave Trott’s brilliant blog, but there isn’t a way to count its visitors separately from those visiting the website of Dave’s agency, CST.

I'm only counting English language blogs.

If I've missed anyone out who should be here, please tell me and I'll put them in next time.

Hi Scamp.I checked out your recommendation: Talent Imitates, Genius Steals.You're absolutely right, you do leave it feeling you've learned something.Especially his November 11 post which was a video of a speech he made in New York: "Interesting: A History of Recombinant Culture"Thanks a lot, I'm a convert.

Why is 'Only Dead Fish' not in the worldwide list? It looks like it ought to be.

Can I just mention this to probe for further information (even though it looks a little self serving): I get 2-3 times as many visitors as Adliterate (his stats can be found on his website or at http://my2.statcounter.com/project/standard/stats.php?account_id=1365836&login_id=5&code=d6cc6c7037735f8ac87210151b320301&guest_login=1&project_id=2038466) but my readers aren't very 'Alexa', so I don't appear on the list. May I ask those who are above Adliterate to give an idea of their stats so I could have a clue of where I'd be if all my readers were Alexa?

Ben, the problem isn’t that not all your readers use Alexa toolbar, the problem is that you can’t always tell whether it is a manned page load or a browser generated visit. For instance, my browser refreshes all the tabs whenever there’s any sign of traffic on my computer (an e-mail notification is enough, RSS updates etc.), so a hit counter will record a huge number of page loads – imagine how this works for those who use a software that reroutes traffic through random IP addresses. Every single refresh is a fake first time visitor. Besides the visits coming from dedicated lines, you really can’t tell what the real number of unique visitors is. Alexa's stats can still give you an idea of where you are -- not all your readers use Alexa Toolbar, not all Adliterate readers use Alexa Toolbar. It's a... proportional hit counter failure.

It seems that technology is disappointingly advanced these days.

"In answer to your question about stats, Scamp currently gets about 50,000 unique visitors a month."

Anca, I'm ashamed to say that I only understand about half of that. Do you mean that Adliterate is really getting more hits than ITIABTWC, or the hits we see on statcounter are somewhat untrue, or both, or neither?

A good part of the hits on statcounter (on any statcounter) are indeed fake hits, so even if you think you get more visitors than X blog, it’s really hard to tell whether it’s true or not. Alexa Toolbar seems to be better at detecting rerouters, so even if on a different hit counter you appear to rank higher than Adliterate, Alexa charts might reveal the opposite. Of course, there’s a chance that your visitors are mostly Alexa-haters, but… that’s unlikely. :)